The user probably isn't suggesting the designers of SimCity are prescient; it's just that the assumptions that are designed into these games are clear reflections of the social perspective at the time. Assumptions like these tend to have inertia through time, and the user is likely just pointing out their surprise at the change.

I am not saying that SimCity predicts the future, rather I had assumptions growing up in that period, probably similar to everyone else at the time, that Nuclear and Fusion were the future of energy. It is cool to see that shift so soundly to solar in just two decades.

They predicted they had a better chance of getting rich off the game as opposed to the stock market

Price probably played a pretty big role, too. The up front cost of a new nuclear plant is eye watering. Hard to compete against solar & battery these days which can be spun up in months and cost comparatively pennies.

Nuclear has to be the most cultish topic on HN, I swear. Anything less than full-throated support for nuclear gets downvoted into oblivion and it simply doesn't matter how well-reasoned those views are.

To borrow the meme about LISP [1], if nuclear was so good, it would've caught on at any point in the last 80 years. And it hasn't for some good reasons:

- It's too expensive. As an example, Hinkley Point-C in the UK has a super high negotiated rate that only lasts 35 years for a plant that still needs a lifetime of 60 to justify the investment so who knows how expensive the power will be for those last 25 years;

- It takes too long to build, typically ~20 years;

- Fuel processing (to create the fuel rods) creates a lot of harmful waste (eg UF6) and it is not a solved problem;

- Processing of spent fuel is not a solved problem. There's this idea that you just stick it in a barrel and leave it for a thousand years doesn't match the reality. It typically needs active cooling for possibly decades, for a start;

- Failure modes for a single plant dwarf any other alternative. The standard counterpoint is global warming from fossil fuels but that's for the entire fossil fuel ecosystem. The clean up for Fukushima, for example, will likely take over a century and cost over $1 trillion;

- The taxpayer bears the burden for these failures because, in the US for example, the industry self-insurance fund is a couple of orders magnitude too small to cover it;

- Nuclear requires liability limits well below any such failure mode to make it remotely economical (eg the Price-Anderson Act liability limits);

- The ecosystem of building, maintaining, repairing, servicing, monitoring and regulating nuclear power plants as well as all the supply chains (eg transporting and storing fuel) takes a long time to scale up.

I really wish I understood why nuclear has this cult-like following. It's completely irrational.

[1]: https://paulgraham.com/iflisp.html

Interesting perspective. As someone who didn't even grow up in the US, I saw Sim City as a builder of relatively low density, hard zoning cities that had little to do with the high density I grew up in. The idea of commercial zones didn't even make sense to me, as in Spain, such thing doesn't exist. Need for traffic to get to the commercial zones made little sense.

Solar seems to be working just fine in Spain, a place where almost nobody lives in a stand alone house, or even a row house. You still put solar in the building, but then you have industrial solar in places wi5 little agricultural value, and wind turbines installed on top of hills. All of this could work just fine in any sim city I remember, as you are just dedicating space to power, which is fine.

I live in a place that gets typhoons, but there's probably only one big enough to rip my panels off every once in 5 years. Still, you never know which one it will be and I don't look forward to having to taken mine inside for false alarms.

I've seen plenty of solar in areas that get hit by hurricanes or tropical cyclones. If your panels get blown to bits, you just put up new panels once the storm is over (or you know, take them down when the storm is forecasted)

That's a very narrow view of solar. Solar, like any other form of electricity, can be transmitted, even very large distances. There's no reason that places like the US Southwest can't generate a whole bunch of solar and export it to the national grid.

Plus below a certain cost threshold, the risk of damage still means the overall cost is lower.

Geothermal is a thing :)

I you only need heating, something like this might work

https://youtu.be/9Ry4QBQejFU?is=3AXWnkcqHGx01j6e

> it's possible for me to have my own solar system

Finally, some much needed progress towards Sagan's apple pie.

If its any consolation, with your solar system you have a shared massive fusion reactor

The simplest form of a nuclear reactor is some small sphere of purified heavy metal put onto a cavity on a thick Be sphere and covered by another piece of the same metal. The reactor can be started up and shut down by lowering or lifting the top piece using a flathead screwdriver shoved between two pieces, which can kill anybody nearby if dropped and the pieces go ultra super critical. That has to be a lot simpler than even a basic solar cell by itself.

The nature of disruptive solutions is that they can be adopted easily at the bottom of the market - which means in this case people like you rather than at the centrally planned utility.

Nuclear waste materials aren't hard to dispose of, they just have extremely high abuse potential. That's why they have to be safely stored for million years away from civilization, so that they cannot be dug up by current and future terrorists.

I think there was some ex-French colony government that demanded France disclose details of nuclear waste burial sites for "safety" reasons, which France rejected. Which means it happens. That kind of thing is why nuclear wastes are supposedly and actually so "dangerous" and small private owned generators get "complicated".

Yeah, Nuclear is one of those solutions where in an ideal world it makes sense, but in the real world it is just too complex all around make it work.

It's not like solar panels don't use raw materials.

It's from 2022, so probably outdated.

> According to the US Department of Energy (DOE), about 12% of all silicon metal produced worldwide (also known as “metallurgical-grade silicon” or MGS) is turned into polysilicon for solar panel production. China produces about 70% of the world’s MGS and 77% of the world’s polysilicon. Converting silicon to polysilicon requires very high temperatures, and in China it’s coal that largely fuels these plants. Xinjiang—a region in China of abundant coal and low electricity prices—produces 45% of the world’s polysilicon.

> Reports indicate that some Xinjiang polysilicon plants have employed forced labor of Uyghurs, an intensely persecuted Muslim ethnic minority.

[0] https://blog.ucs.org/charlie-hoffs/mining-raw-materials-for-...